Anabel Fall on behaving versus being

What this conversation is about

Anabel Fall joined Glenn Llopis live from Zurich. Her role at the time was group head of people, innovation and transformation at Zurich Insurance, working with business strategy on an integrated career and rewards framework in the service of what she calls work sustainability. She came to it from strategy consulting and corporate responsibility work, and she is unusually direct.

Glenn opened where he always does, with the individual, and asked when she feels psychologically safe. With friends and family, she said, because they care about her as a person rather than about what she brings to the table, which is the condition that makes feedback usable. She added that age helped, because she cares less now what other people think.

"I don't want to go back to that time. I actually really enjoy now that I found my own full self" — Anabel Fall · 00:01:29

Behave, or be

Asked why most employees do not feel that safety at work, she pointed at organizations that are not congruent, at politics real or perceived, and at what training actually teaches.

The line at the top of this page is her answer: course after course tells people what to do, and almost none of it addresses what lies behind the doing. Many leaders, she adds, were themselves led by people who looked for someone to complete tasks rather than someone who brought impact, which leaves everyone performing a version of themselves.

"we always say, you have to bring your full self. You have to be authentic, but sometimes people say what happens if I'm really my full self, would you really want to see that?" — Anabel Fall · 00:02:48

Her practical suggestion is to be careful about who is made a leader at all, and to stop treating people leadership as the only route to seniority; agile organizations, she notes, often separate leading people from managing projects. A leader also has to be willing to question themselves and admit they do not have the answers, because the honest skill now is asking the right question, which comes from listening fully rather than preparing a response.

Why leaders cannot let go

Glenn put the pattern in the method’s terms:

"this is the dangers of standardization because standardization limits individual contribution. It limits creativity. It limits how far an individual can go, because we have to stay on track with what the protocols say." — Glenn Llopis · 00:12:26

Fall’s answer named the mechanism rather than the attitude.

"Many leaders think they need to control, and this need to control creates an automatic way of no longer looking at another person as an individual that brings something." — Anabel Fall · 00:13:28

Her remedy is structural: strip out rules and replace them with principles, since principles travel and rules do not. Use systems to support the right conversations rather than expecting a system to solve the problem. And work on what a job is, moving from a list of tasks to a description of the nature of the work and the impact expected from the person doing it.

That led to the turn in the conversation Glenn called out at the time. Everyone talks about psychological safety for employees. What she had just described is that a leader cannot let go unless the leader feels safe, and most of them do not.

"if we all just do what we're told to do, we don't bring that diversity and we get zero value from diversity." — Anabel Fall · 00:15:29

Guest, or peer

On the people function itself, she is blunt. She would not have entered human resources twenty years ago, when it was mostly compliance, and she dislikes the term for making people equivalent to other resources. What she wants from the function is not ownership of culture but the right conversations: knowing the business well enough to bring in the right people, and designing reward and performance systems that match the culture an organization says it wants.

Her sharpest observation is about where the function sits.

"if you're a guest, you behave differently than if you're peer... you feel a different psychological safety, I guess you are in the room, but also meant to be in the room and not as a guest." — Anabel Fall · 00:22:30

She has watched people leaders define their job as pleasing the business. Hers, she says, is to tell leaders what they need to hear rather than what they want to hear, and that is not a human resources problem but a universal one. Her own last change program she deliberately ran as a business project, with business leaders leading the content, because change driven from one function does not happen.

Work sustainability, and the next standardization

Her definition of work sustainability is a workforce that can be successful today and tomorrow, and knows how to prepare. The honest version means telling people which roles will go away as repetitive work is automated, then helping them upskill, internal talent before external. She can bring you to the well, she says, but cannot make you drink; what she will not do is treat adults like children by pretending the change is not coming.

Glenn asked whether all of this is the consequence of years of suppressing individuality. She said yes. Then he offered a last provocation:

"I actually believe that technology might be the next form of standardization. In other words, we seem to over-index on shiny objects, but we under index on the human." — Glenn Llopis · 00:33:45

She agreed, with the reasoning of someone who builds systems: a platform is designed for the mass, not the individual, which is how technology ends up creating control and dependence even when it promises personalization. Her parting advice was to be yourself and be humble, know your faults and your strengths, and accept that you do not need to have all the answers.